I’m watching last night’s ER. It had Parminder Nagra in a paramedic uniform *and* a Serena Williams guest appearance.

Lord have mercy.

There are big fat snowflakes flying by my window as I type this. There were some flakes in the air yesterday but nothing that stuck. This stuff is already starting to cover the courtyard. How depressing.

.:.
A few of us went over to the TV rooms in the bar last night to watch The Office on DVD, but there was a huge crowd of supremely drunken idiots in the bar singing (and I use the term loosely) karaoke so loudly that we had to crank the TV to have any chance at hearing the dialogue. It was painful. I considered shoving a pencil in my ear just to end the torture.

Like I said, some of them were crazy drunk. Like, screaming into the microphone, have to held up by my friend/boyfriend/skeevy-guy-who’s-about-to-take-advantage-of-me drunk. I can’t imagine it’ll be awkward come Monday. Not at all.

.:.
Right. I’m off to the exam. Shouldn’t take me too long, unless I’ve forgotten how to write. Yep, that’s right: we have to *write* the exam, avec pen and paper. No laptops for the IT exam. No irony there.

All set to go for the post-exam cab ride home tomorrow:

• Maria Taylor . “Song Beneath The Song”
• Ben Folds . “Your Redneck Past”
• Troubled Hubble . “What We Do”
• Uncut . “Understanding The New Violence”
• Nada Surf . “Imaginary Friends”
• …Trail Of Dead . “Let It Dive”
• Arcade Fire . “Rebellion (Lies)”

The presentations are over, so all that’s left now is the exam. I don’t have to study much at all, so I think I’m going to do a bit of work, flip through my notes and have a few beers.

The Raptors are now 0-8. Look out ’99 Clippers.

.:.
We finished working tonight before most groups. We stopped working at 10:45; some people seemed to think they’d be there for *quite* a while.

As of this minute we’re 70% done this course. We’re also 30% of the way through the MBA.

Sorry about not posting anything this week. I’m away on training and have been too busy to watch a movie, listen to music, read a newspaper or even check up on my usual feeds. When I get home Friday or Saturday I’m sure I’ll have something deep and inspirational to share with y’all.

Day 4 and the food is finally getting to everybody. Not that it’s horrible, necessarily, but it’s just that you start to see the same food show up in diffrent forms several days in a row. Sunday: beef kebabs; Monday: beef dip sandwiches; Tuesday: flank steak; Wednesday: beef goulash. Still, it’s free and somebody makes it for me, so I can’t complain too much. By tomorrow night, though, I’ll be craving Wendy’s or pizza or something that tastes mass produced in a different way.

Everyone also notices their skin getting dry and cracked from the air in the rooms. It’s been too cold to open the windows at night, and while the institute is nice enough to provide little humidifiers, they have weird green lights that suggest an alien invasion is beginning.

Plus…no gym this week. There’s a class in there. Which means no basketball or anything else. Not that I’ve had a lot of time for it anyway.

But on the upside our group seems to be doing well. We’re well on schedule for tomorrow’s presentation, and I’m actually excited about the content. I’m hoping we can blow a few people away, or at least freak a few people out. Disruption!!

48 hours from now I’ll be home. Seems far away (since there’s a late night, 8 hours of classroom sessions, a presentation, a night at the bar and an exam packed in there) but surely I can propel myself on diet pepsi for that long.

Punch it, chewie!

The weather’s finally beginning to look nasty…not that I’ll experience any of it until Friday afternoon. When we’re up here on course we don’t leave the building, only experiencing fresh air during the occasional stroll across the courtyard to the hotel. But, as I said, it’s looking nasty…so I’m not exactly looking forward to being outside anyway. Rain today, maybe thunderstorms, rain tomorrow, chance of flurries Thursday and Friday. Guh.

.:.
Things are going ok. The subject matter is reasonably interesting, if not really new for me. Our project group seems to be humming along well. The food is…well, walking a fine line between “not bad” and “what the?”

.:.
I’m pissed that I can’t be at home to celebrate my wife’s big raise. Also, I hear through voicemail that CBGB have bought a house (congrats, guys) so I wish I could’ve been around to celebrate that too. Stupid lifelong learning…

Day 1 down. It hasn’t been too bad so far, but I can see us spending a shitload of time working on this project. The subject matter is reasonably interesting (to me, anyway). I think I have a pretty good group, though they’ve made the mistake of putting Evan and I together. It’s already gotten pretty silly; there was a comparison of our IT systems to the millenium falcon, and now we’re hypothesizing that there’s a wookie and a droid in the back rooms of our data centre fixing things with blowtorches and space wrenches.

You had to be there.

Right, I’m off to another MBA session in the Ontario hinterlands* tomorrow morning. I’m sure I’ll be leaving comments here letting you all know how well/badly it’s going. Maybe I’ll just post the running total on my bar tab and let you guess what that means.

*Scarborough/Markham